Audiogon speaker wire gurus, please help me

What is your source component? When I want to add warmth, air and a 3-D soundstage, the source would typically be one of the first places I look. If the air, warmth and soundstage aren't adequately produced by the source, no amount of money spent on amplification, speakers or wires is every going to help you overcome the deficiency.

TIC

The problem with any recommendation is generally people are going to recommend what they use... but they have no idea what you gear sounds like, or even more important, what you like.

If Rives did your room, I guess you want to buy the best cable you can afford. Everything from mapleshade is junk, so you can cross them off the list. There are lots of cheap cables that people will tout as giant-killers, but they end up only killing your desire to ever use your system again.

My suggestion (which is just as useless as all the others, since I have never heard your system) would be to try Purist Venustus. I have heard the Cary gear and found it to be soft and pudgy around the midrange, and generally lacking in detail. I think the Purist will prevent anymore loss in these areas. They tend to work well where the Cary does not, so it might be a good balance.

There are people from whom you can borrow/audition cables, which is the easiest way to know how it will sound in your room.

O

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Thanks guys. Here's what I did: I bought audience Au24 speaker cable which defenitely changed the sound...less lush, but more accurate and slightly less forward. I bought cardas golden cross interconnects for my CD player, which helped alot, and shunyata hydra 8 power conditioning which helped marginally (over Richard Gray), but still not exactly there yet. Now I have taken the advice of many to adress system synergy, especially my CD player, and am waiting on delivery of a MBL 1531 player. Hopefully this will be it for a while! Thanks for the help.

Tcheathertree,

If you are still not "there" yet, perhaps try changing the tubes in your preamp. I think you would be able to fine tune the sound easier this way. There are probably many warm-sounding 6DJ8s available.

Tcheathertree:

Here is a review of some Empirical Design cables I ran up against the Au-24. You might be interested in how they performed in my system versus the Audience wires. A great value and utterly fantastic sound.

Here is the link:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?fcabl&1172712551&openmine&zzDodgealum&4&5#Dodgealum